Pros
When we started at the company the manager – who later left – was great, the salary was good, we were told our team was specialist and that the company valued us... Little did we know, that was all about to change.
Cons
Cohere used and continues to use loopholes to exploit writers, labelling them as contractors, (with what are effectively zero-hours contracts) while requiring them to commit to a minimum number of hours per week or else lose their job. Employee status was never on the cards, yet office space and food was provided, working hours were controlled, I had to sign an exclusivity clause saying I wouldn't work for competitors and, later, a robotic, dehumanising – and it turns out completely ineffective – performance monitoring system got implemented. This monitoring resulted in tyrannical micromanagement of the hours of the day, minute-by-minute, a sudden change over a year into our engagement with the company. To assuage fears – and a considerable decline in mental wellbeing – in my team, the company communicated that we should not worry, that five minute breaks throughout the day were allowed to use the toilet and check personal messages, that nothing was going to change – one week later they sent a revised communication saying that toilet breaks were not allowed on billed time, even though many of us would regularly be working in the office. I have never been in a work environment that requires you to minus your toilet breaks from your time worked in the office. Having committed to 16 hours a week, minimum, there was promptly a work drought – meaning that those of us on the team had turned down good freelance work elsewhere and now no longer had an income. Gleefully, the company referred back to our contracts – the resounding message was, 'no, we do not have to supply hours, you just have to commit to them (even if they are not provided) or you're out'. A lose-lose situation for the writers that were once taken on as the company's golden team and their get-out-of-jail-free card for 'ethical' LLM training that included human writers. In the end, in a process they called a 'winding down' of the project, many 'contractors' who had worked consistently at the company for over two years were let go with just over a week's notice in a five minute mass video call in which a manager sat silently and sipped an iced coffee on camera. After this call, I received an email telling me having a week and a half's notice was a generous bonus on the part of the company, since our contracts gave three days. So, I suppose all of the above makes Cohere's mission statement, 'We believe AI’s highest purpose is to enhance human wellbeing', sound rather ironic, doesn't it?
